Voters tell ALP to 'get your act together'

The returning Labor MP for the Victorian seat of Ballarat, Catherine King, says the public has delivered a clear message to the Labor Party, to get its act together.

Ms King held onto her seat but there was a 7 per cent swing to the Liberals.

She has been the Member for Ballarat since 2001 and going into the election, her seat was considered safe, with a margin of 11.7 per cent.

She says she recognises there has been a significant swing to the Liberal Party but says that is mainly due a dissatisfaction with Labor on a national level.

"People have been wanting to say to Labor, get your act together basically," she said.

The Liberal candidate, John Fitzgibbon, says it is more than that.

"We ran a really good campaign here in the Ballarat electorate," he said.

"We've seen a swing that's above the trend both at state and at national [level]."

Mr Fitzgibbon says he enjoyed running for the seat and will decide later whether he will try again at the next election.

Wannon

In Wannon, in south-west Victoria, the returning Liberal Member, Dan Tehan, says he is pleased and humbled to be re-elected.

Mr Tehan has held the seat since 2010 and increased his margin by 4 per cent this election.

He says he is looking forward to representing the region in Government this time.

"Obviously I've only known being a member of Parliament in opposition, so now I'm going to have to knuckle down and do the same in government and the first thing I'll be doing is looking to honour the election commitments that I have made during this campaign," he said.

The Labor candidate for Wannon, Michael Barling, says he is pleased with the campaign he ran and always understood it would be a difficult seat to win.

"I was conscious of all those issues but the reality is, we made the decision, the family and I, that we would contest this election and we've got no regrets, we knew what we were getting in for," he said.

"As I said, it's been a really positive experience."

Meanwhile, Liberal candidate Sarah Henderson has won the ultra-marginal seat of Corangamite, with a swing of 4 per cent on a two-party preferred basis

Ms Henderson beat Labor's Darren Cheeseman who held the seat since 2007.

She says she will work hard over the next three years to get Australia back on track and says she is proud of some of her commitments to the region.

"The upgrade of the Great Ocean Road really resonated very strongly right throughout this electorate but I also fought very hard on some other issues like standing up for a community in Dereel who'd been affected by a bushfire and who desperately need a mobile phone base station that's been denied to them," she said.